bunny1naturehaven

A cottontail rabbit. Image courtesy of naturehaven.com.

Almost every day, I walk Buddy the Wonderdog in the woods by my dwelling house. This past summertime, I was creeped out to see two dead rabbits on the edge of the woods. The incidents happened at separate times but in almost the same locations. The rabbits' heads were gone, merely much of their bodies was still in that location.

And so yesterday, I saw a headless rabbit again along a different edge of the woods. Information technology lay in the snowfall with its fur ruffled at the beginning of the trailhead — about every bit if someone had placed it in that location on purpose. A bloody mangled mess of musculus marked where its head and one of its legs had been. No animal tracks led to or from the body. Information technology was as if the rabbit dropped from the sky.

Mysterious.

I finally got curious enough to investigate. I searched the internet for "animals that consume rabbit heads." I came up with a story from the Toronto Star in Canada that described the horror some schoolchildren felt when they found headless bunnies nearly their schoolyard. The children thought a person with evil intentions decapitated the rabbits.

However, people familiar with the ways of wild fauna responded that the bunnies were the piece of work of an owl, not a Satanic Cult. They explained that owls tin't carry the whole rabbit, so they only have the head.

That's the same explanation my woods-wise friends gave me when I described the gruesome scene from my dog walks. Too, brains are made out of fat, so I suppose owls get more than free energy from eating them than from eating other parts of a rabbit.

Similar to the situation mentioned in the news article, the rabbits' bodies I saw this summer were most the same location each time. I recall that makes sense. Animals tend to hang out in the same places. If an owl plant a rabbit in a certain place one time, information technology must exist a skilful place for rabbits, so they are likely to hunt there over again.

The lack of tracks besides makes the case for an owl doing the killing (or another type of raptor) versus a human being or an beast. The owl attacked from higher up, so of course it wouldn't leave tracks.

I am glad to acquire that the headless bunnies are only a case of nature taking its course, and non the work of twisted humans. But I am yet sorta creeped out.